There was tremendous rise and subsequent rapid spread of the concept of the ´Scientific Revolution´ during the periods between 1924 and the 1960´s. Two major factors are responsible for this development. Firstly, this concept was particularly forged as an analytical tool for the study and understanding of the emergence of modern science as a
49H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, p.21
historical issue. The other was the establishment of the history of science as a professional academic disciple which occurred as a result of the fresh academic opportunities offered by the evolving articulations of the new concept of the Scientific Revolution. It was within the first decades of the twentieth century that a genuinely historical debate over the nature and the causes of the changes in the sixteenth-seventeenth-century science flourished.
In 1924 Edwin Arthur Burtt published The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. His philosophical thesis analyses how the human spirit has been read out of the cosmos at large through the advent of modern science. It makes a paradoxical representation of how the autonomy of the human mind was downgraded and banished by the same atomic universe it created through modern science. The thesis provides a framework for an overview of drastically novel ideas, mostly those in the mathematical and the corpuscularian mode, from Copernicus to Isaac Newton (1642-1727), but with much emphasis on Newton.
Alexandre Koyré, in Études Galiléennes (1939) coined ´Scientific Revolution´ and applied it as an analytical tool for grasping the essence of the rise of modern science. He analyses the concept in very restricted sense as the deep ramifications of Galileo´s novel mathematically idealized treatment of motion. Here, Galileo´s work was interpreted as a sort of Platonic intellectual transformation. Also, one need to read together Koyré´s La revolution astronomique (1961) and his Newtonian Studies (1965) to get an adequate picture of the expanded meaning he gave to the concept in later years. In the Galileo Studies he worked out the physic-mathematical current in early modern science, while in the Newtonian Studies adequate consideration was given to the empirical and experimental current with deliberate appreciation of the Democritean conception of the atomic structure of reality.
In The Origins of Modern Science: 1300-1800 (1949), Herbert Butterfield, a British political historian, wrote a comprehensive summary of what we now term the Scientific Revolution. In the Origins Butterfield applied the revolution label not only to the Scientific Revolution and to several of its components but also to ¨The Postponed
Revolution in Chemistry¨50, as if it were a delayed component of the Scientific Revolution. One could see in this work a clear divide between inner and outer Scientific Revolution. The inner Scientific Revolution runs across the various scientific adventures from Copernicus to Newton and was effectively distinguished from an outer Scientific Revolution which he superficially and rapidly surveyed in a technically undemanding way. Likewise, the anti-whiggism which he had advocated in his The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), after being imported from political history, became a major constraint on the new historiography of science, especially in the Anglophone world. Above all, it was his Origins that suggested to many readers that there had been several scientific revolutions and not just one single enormous one.
Subsequently, A. Rupert Hall, a full-fledged historian of science who worked from primary sources, published his The Scientific Revolution (1954). In this moderately technical survey that runs from 1500 to 1800, Hall treats the creation of modern science at the hands of, mostly, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) as the gradually emerging triumph of rationality. The organization of the book is more diffuse than those previously listed, partly because it gave ample attention to such non-mathematical disciplines as chemistry and the life sciences. Later on, many other scholars spoke of the Scientific Revolution, the achievements of the period from Copernicus to Newton, including such luminaries as Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Huygens, Boyle, and Leibniz.
Long before these scholars and many of their contemporaries formally recognized the rise of modern science as a legitimate historical problem, scientists and philosophers were already writing on the nature of the modern science. Such works include Ernst Mach´s The Science of Mechanics (1883)51 and William Whewell´s History of the Inductive Sciences (1837)52 and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840)53.
50 ¨The Postponed Revolution in Chemistry¨ is a chapter title in Herbert Butterfield´s The Origin of Modern Science. In it he illustrates how the new foundation of chemistry was laid by the works of Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestley, Joseph Black, Henry Cavendish and Antoine Laviosier. See Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800, pp. 203-221
51 Ernst Mach. The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development, trans.
Thomas. J. McCormack 4th ed (Palm Springs, USA: Watchmaker pub., 2010[1919]). Original German version Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung historisch-kritisch dargestellt. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1883)
52 William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time. 3rd ed. 3 vols. (London: Parker, 1857)
According to Whewell, scientific progress is dependent upon the ability of men of genius to formulate clear ideas and apply them to distinct facts. When this is done science flourishes and there is an Inductive Epoch. It is possible to have preludes and sequels to the Inductive Epochs and, since science is sometimes stagnant, we also find Stationary Periods. The Middle Ages is the prime example of a Stationary Period between the era of Greek science and the rise of modern science.
However, Continuity theorists such as Pierre Duhem (1906), John Herman Randall (1940), Alistair C. Crombie (1959), Marshall Clagett (1959), and more recent historians such as Peter Dear (2001) have pointed out very major difficulty in speaking of ¨the Scientific Revolution.¨54 This difficulty lies in locating the alleged sharp break of modern science from medieval and Renaissance practices that discontinuity historians like Alexandre Koyré and Thomas S. Kuhn had illustrated. According to the continuity theorists, when examined closely in their own cultural context, all the supposed revolutionaries are found to have had one foot in the old traditions and to have relied heavily on the work of predecessors.
Consequently, the debate has since remained on how did this vast enterprise of modern science get its start? What were the unique elements in the Western tradition that stimulated its creation and rapid growth? Did science emerge because of a mutation in the intellectual life of Europe or through a long development process? Does its origin and growth depend upon external factors, such as socio-political and economic conditions, or upon factors from within science? These are questions that have perplexed historians for years. For more than half century now, historians attempting to answer them have turned to the histories of science, economics, religion, intellectualism, psychoanalysis, political ideology, art and the occult, and sociology. For many historians, ´the Scientific Revolution´ now describes a topic area rather than a
53 William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History. 2nd ed. 2 vols. (London: Parker, 1847)
54 See Pierre Duhem. Études sur Léonard de Vinci: Ceux qu´il a lus et ceux qui l´ont lu. 3 vols. Paris:
Hermann, 1906; 1913 (2nd impression, Paris: De Nobele, 1955); John. H Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1940), 1st published in 1926; Alistair C. Crombie. Medieval and Early Modern Science (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); Peter Dear.
Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)
clearly demarcated event. Invariably, the concept of Scientific Revolution has remained what Margaret J. Osler has called the ´single most unifying concept in the history of science´.55
Various attempts by historians and philosophers of science to find out what was characteristically new about modern science as distinct from previous systems of natural philosophy have precipitated into varying theories which can also be regarded as theses of the scientific revolution. The theses include The Kuhnian thesis by Thomas S. Kuhn, Shapin thesis—Stephen Shapin, A. Mark Smith—Smith thesis, David C. Lindberg—
Lindberg thesis, Edgar Zilsel—Zilsel/Craftsman thesis, Boris Hessen—Hessen thesis, Robert K. Merton—Merton thesis, Alexandre Koyré—Koyré thesis, Pierre Duhem—
Duhem thesis, Herbert J. Butterfield—Butterfield thesis, Joseph Needham—Needham thesis, Frances Yates—Yates thesis, Richard S. Westfall—Westfall thesis, The Continuity thesis—Alistair C. Crombie, The Hall thesis—A. Rupert Hall, The Ben-David thesis—Joseph Ben-Ben-David, The Popkin thesis—Richard Popkin, The Mandrou thesis—Robert Mandrou, The Burtt thesis—Edwin A. Burtt and the Eisenstein thesis—
Elizabeth Eisenstein. A good number of these theses have been given comprehensive analysis in various works on the historiography of the Scientific Revolution.56
1.4 TWO TRADITIONS OF ACCOUNT OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS